Digital Transformation Quotes

Digital transformation quotes are sound bites of wisdom from thought leaders and trusted advisors. Reflect on them in the context of your own organisation and help steer your enterprise through the digital economy.

Digital Transformation Quotes 1 to 10

“In some ways, incumbents have a lot of benefits over new players, over start-ups. They have customers, they have great data, they often have a brand. They have financial resources, which a start-up may not have. The question is, can all of those capabilities and assets be deployed in a way that allows you to defend against new attackers as digital disrupts your industry?”

Paul Willmott | Director at McKinsey

“In today’s world of exponential change, organisations that get too comfortable with the status quo are at major risk of disruption. If you’re not experimenting and, as a director, if you’re not asking questions about how your organisation is navigating and plugging into disruption, forming new ecosystems, and tapping into open markets, then your organisation is at risk. In the area of talent alone, if you’re not leveraging talent outside your organisation, you’ll never win the war of ideas because the smartest people in the world don’t work for you.”

Andrew Vaz | Global Chief Innovation Officer at Deloitte

“The biggest impedient to a company’s future success is its past success.”

Dan Schulman | CEO of PayPal

“When digital transformation is done right, it’s like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but when done wrong, all you have is a really fast caterpillar.”

George Westerman | Principal Research Scientist with the MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy

“Most of the executives I talk to are still very much focused on digital largely as a way to do “more of the same,” just more efficiently, quickly, cost effectively. But I don’t see a lot of evidence of fundamentally stepping back and rethinking, at a basic level, “What business are we really in?”

John Hagel III | Co-Chairman at Deloitte LLP Center for the Edge leaders

“One of the factors that I believe is the biggest obstacle to transformation is the fear of cannibalization.”

Ganesh Ayyar | CEO at Mphasis

“When a snake sheds its skin it changes; when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it transforms.”

Someone at the Business Transformation Academy

“At least 40% of all businesses will die in the next 10 years… if they don’t figure out how to change their entire company to accommodate new technologies”

John Chambers | Executive Chairman, Cisco System

“If you think of the average age of most board members around the world – and, frankly, of their backgrounds as well – they are not digitally ready.”

James Bilefield | Senior Advisor to McKinsey

“In the digital age of ‘overnight’ success stories such as Facebook, the hard slog is easily overlooked.”

Sir James Dyson | Founder of Dyson

Digital Transformation Quotes 11 to 20

“Only 40% of CIOs will lead the digital transformation of the enterprise by 2018.”

Someone at IDC

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change”

Charles Darwin | English Naturalist and Geologist

“Silicon Valley is coming and if banks don’t up their game, then tech companies will take over the industry’s business. There are hundreds of startups with a lot of brains and money working on various alternatives to traditional banking”

Jamie Dimon | Chairman, President and CEO of JPMorgan Chase

“We’ve moved from digital products and infrastructure to digital distribution and Web strategy to now into more holistic transformations that clearly are based on mobile, social media, digitization and the power of analytics and we think it’s really a new era requiring new strategies.”

Saul Berman | IBM

“Data is fact, not truth. I still feel it’s a little dangerous for brands to throw out intuition and common sense and to only obey what the data tells them. Is A actually better than B, or is it simply the lesser of two evils?”

James Peck | The Iconic

“We should no longer be talking about ‘digital marketing’ but marketing in a digital world.”

Keith Weed | Unilever, 2015

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”

“In today’s era of volatility, there is no other way but to re-invent. The only sustainable advantage you can have over others is agility, that’s it.Because nothing else is sustainable, everything else you create, somebody else will replicate.”

Jeff Bezos | Amazon founder

“The Last ten years of IT have been about changing the way people work. The next ten years of IT will be about transforming your business.”

Aaron Levie | CEO of Box

Digital Transformation Quote 21 to 22

“At this time of uncertainty and disruption, strategy design and execution have never been more important. The challenge is not simply to spend time on strategy, but to truly inject courage into strategy – by engaging in courageous conversations, sparking courageous considerations, and ultimately making and acting upon courageous choices.”

Jonathan Goodman | Vice President of Deloitte Canada

“Every part of the UK economy and our lives has been digitised – from how we shop and entertain ourselves to the way we travel to work and manage our health”